Tuesday, August 02, 2005

It's Noah, Not No... Uh

Have you ever been told to do something and everyone was trying their best to get you to fail? As a Christian, through prayer and reading of God's word, there will be times where you feel like God is telling you to do something or give you direction; but what if it is a situation where you aren't sure if you want to do it because of the way the world will look at you?

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of Noah and the ark in Genesis 6:1-11:32. The Bible says in Genesis 6:9 that Moses was the only righteous man on earth at that time and that he walked closely with God. When God saw that the earth had become corrupt and was filled with violence he told Noah in verse 13, "I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. Yes, I will wipe them all from the face of the earth!"

That's not all God told Noah though; He told Noah to build a boat so that he and his family would be spared from the coming flood. Now this wasn't just any boat! This boat was one and a half football fields long and as high as a four-story building! (Genesis 6:14-16)

Can you image how Noah felt when God told him that He was going to destroy everything and that He wanted him to build a boat? Noah had no idea what a boat looked like and probably hadn't seen a huge body of water before! Surely the people must have been warned about the flood, but they didn't do anything about it. In fact, the people around Noah most likely thought he was crazy for doing what he did! But no matter how weird the instructions were that God gave him, and no matter how much the world around him ridiculed him, he still did what God commanded him to!

Nothing has changed since Noah's day. We've been warned about sin and God's judgment upon it, but no matter how many warning we get, we still continue to sin. As a Christian, there will be times when you will feel like doing the wrong thing because of the fear that the world will think of you differently if you did right. It's at times like these we need to remember that we need to be like Noah: we need to follow through with God's plan instead of sitting there saying "no... uh".